Cars Land Getting A New Attraction In 2016

The grand redesign of the Disney California Adventure theme park, which was completed in 2012, featured two major changes – Buena Vista Street would provide the park with its own version of Main Street, U.S.A, and Cars Land would be the first “land” in a Disney park fully recreating a film setting. Both additions have been meet with universally rave reviews, but that does not mean everything was perfect. Disney has announced a completely new version of the Luigi’s Flying Tires attraction will soon be installed. Find more details after the break!

Radiator Springs Racers and Mater’s Junkyard Jamboree are the other two attractions in Cars Land. Racers is the flagship ride of the area, and continues to draw massive crowds over two years after its opening. However, Luigi’s Flying Tires has had a bumpier road. The ride is inspired by the Flying Saucers attraction, a popular and memorable ride in the early few years of Disneyland that was ultimately closed after it became challenging to operate. When Luigi’s first opened, it featured large beach balls that guests could knock around and at one another. The beach balls were later removed, but the rest of the ride mechanism was left intact.

Today, Disney announced on the Disney Parks Blog that the ride will soon be an “all-new experience.” One of the biggest changes is that the ride vehicles will now be cars, a large departure from the tire-like vehicles that guests rode on before. Given that Disney places importance on story, even the ride shutting down next week, on February 16th, has been given some context. According to Disney, Luigi will head out for “a vacation to his home country of Italy to visit with family. When he returns, his Casa della Tires will reopen as a completely new attraction in early 2016.”

So we have a preliminary opening date of early 2016, which could technically be anytime from January to April. We also have concept art of what the attraction will look like (above) – there will be a new ride, but it looks like the immediate surroundings will remain intact. After all, Cars Land is billed as an authentic recreation of the Radiator Springs seen in the Cars films, so Casa della Tires has to stay the same.

The only details we have is that the ride “will feature a new ride system and ride vehicles,” not much to go on, which means there is much more information still to be revealed. It will be exciting to see how the new ride will compare to Luigi’s Flying Tires. If you want to get any last rides on the original attraction, you better head over soon.

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About Samad Rizvi

Samad is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Pixar Times and The Disney Times. His favorite films include The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Vertigo, Back to the Future, Children of Men, Pan's Labyrinth, and of course, Pixar's Toy Story and Inside Out.